


but it's better if you do

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mob, Alternate Universe- Organized Crime, Anal Sex, Attempted Murder, Clothed Sex, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Murder, Possessive Behavior, Serious Injuries, bartender!proko, burlesque club owner!k, mentions of past drugged sex but it was consensual bc proko is a Freak Like That(TM), mentions of recreational drug use, mob boyfriends, mobster!k, nothing. that's what., what's more romantic than ur hot mobster boyfriend killing the dude who tried to kill you?, y'all just read it okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 10:04:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16808464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: Prokopenko was no dancer.That’s what people always expected, when they found out K kept a lover who worked at the club he owned. They expected some long-legged gamine thing with alluring eyes and grace in every slinking step.(AKA, Proko and K are mafia boyfriends in love. Who have sex)





	but it's better if you do

**Author's Note:**

> eight point stars tattooed on knees: 'i kneel for no one'   
> cross on knuckles: prison sentences
> 
> started watching the punisher and now I want to fuck billy russo, SO. here's some proko/k.

_ *** _

Prokopenko was no dancer. 

That’s what people always expected, when they found out K kept a lover who worked at the club he owned. They expected some long-legged gamine thing with alluring eyes and grace in every slinking step. 

Prokopenko was no dancer, no temptress, no coy slut fluttering his eyelashes and opening his thighs for the boss to get ahead in the world. 

Prokopenko was a bartender, and not even a very skilled one at that. The Russian in him disdained cocktails and the misanthrope in him disdained actually talking to people. 

However, he was  _ very  _ good with his fists, and had the sort of ramshackle wolffish grace that meant he could vault over the bar and leap into a fight on a half-second’s notice. 

This was a better quality than being a world-class mixologist, and so K didn’t really care if Prokopenko knew how to make anything more than a mojito and a sex on the beach. Pour enough alcohol into a cup and the person drinking it didn’t complain, anyway. Drunks spent more money, were looser with their wallets. 

Prokopenko was good with his fists and he didn’t bother the girls.  _ They  _ all adored Prokopenko, in the way that one might adore a half-rabid Doberman that protected you from a pack of coyotes in the night. They loved the safety he provided, but they’d not be slipping their red-painted fingers into his mouth anytime soon. 

They’d gone to the same expensive prep school, K and Proko. Come up through the ranks together, Proko always on the leash. Ever since they met. They’d been all set to go to Princeton together, too. All up until one night spent drinking too much, one bad decision, and one sentence of vehicular manslaughter. 

So K had gone to Princeton, and Proko had gone to Rikers. 

(K hadn’t been the one to pick him up from the pen, but he sure did welcome him back in true Jersey fashion. A homecoming for them both.) 

He’d worked the streets for K for the first couple years, run the whole damn show in collections and enforcement. Then he’d taken a bullet that strayed just a  _ hair  _ too close to his heart for comfort, and the week he’d been released K had installed him at The Roost, newly-purchased and in desperate need of renovation. 

(Some people whispered that it was because Proko had fucked up, got shot and shown his hand as a rich boy playing at being a gangster. 

Others knew better.) 

K was at The Roost when he wasn’t in meetings or on collections or abroad; his booth was situated in the VIP section behind velvet ropes. 

Hell, his booth  _ was  _ the VIP section, girdled by golden handrails and floating above the floor, directly opposite the stage where the girls performed elaborate dances with elaborate costumes and elaborate props. Too avant-garde to be pornographic, despite the nudity and expert gyrations of their well-paid bevy of dancers. 

K liked that. Liked the dreamlike quality of the place, liked the way it didn’t seem real, liked the way it elevated him over the gangsters who spent all their time in neon-tinged strip joints. 

He could’ve had any of the dancers, whose figures he gazed at from the vantage point of his VIP booth with dark, appraising eyes. 

He could’ve had any of the waitresses. He could’ve had any of the blackjack dealers, any of the bouncers, fuck, any of the goddamn  _ busboys.  _

He wanted  _ Prokopenko, _ whose stone face was that of a long-forgotten god and whose hands could tear a man to pieces. 

And what Joseph Kavinsky wanted, he fuckin’ got. 

***

“What the  _ fuck  _ happened?” K snarled, gesturing violently to the wreck that was once the shining main room of The Roost. Tables overturned and broken glass everywhere, the fishtank beneath the bar shattered and exotic fish carcasses strewn about. A goddamn mess  _ before  _ you considered the three dead bodies. 

“Where’s Proko?” He asked, trying to cool his jets. Scrubbing a hand over his face, feeling thirty years older than his actual age of twenty-eight. Christ. No wonder the movies didn’t follow the guys who’d been the main cheese for decades. What a fucking  _ headache.  _

There was no answer to his question, only a prolonged silence that had him dragging his hands away from his eyes in favor of leveling a bloodshot glare at Jiang, who’d called to get him out of bed and come look at the damage. 

“Jiang.” He enunciated, unused to having his questions go unanswered. “Where’s. Proko?” 

Jiang took only another minute to answer, and when he did it was with a hint of caution in his voice. “Oceanview General.” 

_ Ah.  _

No wonder Jiang hadn’t wanted to tell him, the semi-rational part of K’s brain said logically, right before a haze of red fell over his eyes. 

***

Proko groaned himself awake, feeling the kind of bone-deep ache that you only knew if you’d been shot somewhere not vital to your continued survival. 

The side, this time, and Proko thought surlily of how fucking difficult it was going to be to get his core muscles back up to scratch after he recovered. 

He reached out and smacked the call button, groaning when the movement pulled at his wound. 

The nurse that hurried in looked both annoyed and terrified to the point of pissing her pants, which Proko took to mean that K was in the building. 

“Morphine?” He asked hopefully, and gave her a sliver of a grin, more a baring of teeth than anything. She only nodded and got to work. When it hit his bloodstream he sighed with it, remembering the weeks of numb pleasure that came from their high school drug binges. Fuck, he missed those days sometimes. How shiny he’d been then, how new. All cocaine and unbroken bones. Tight as a virgin for K and eager as all hell for it. Scrawny Ilya Prokopenko, a scrapper and a slut, seventeen and  _ easy.  _

He floated thinking about it, eyes gone glassy and unfocused as he ran them over the cracks in the ceiling tiles overhead, part of him only waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. 

K’s fingers in his hair broke him from his tile-gazing; he sighed with the feeling of it, shivery-good. 

“Baby,” he mumbled in Russian, tongue thick and heavy and clumsy, like it had been wrapped up in cotton wool. He pushed his head further into K’s hand, the half-mad Doberman calmed by his owner’s presence. 

Fuck, he hurt. Even under the hushed cover of the morphine, he hurt. 

“Giletti’s a dead man,” K said to someone above Proko’s head, low and ferocious even with his touch so sweet. “Make it fuckin’ happen.” 

“I’ll get Skov on it,” Swan replied, his voice faraway. Everything faraway. Proko blinked, eyelids gone heavy. Good fucking shit that nurse had given him.

“No,” K said suddenly, as if struck by divine inspiration. His face was lit up with it, even ashen beneath the fluorescents like he was. A kid at Christmas, despite the grim lines of his clenched jaw. “I want to do it myself. Do it  _ right.”  _

“Whatever you want, K.” Swan told him, and then with a  _ whoosh  _ of the automatic door he was gone. Proko’s eyes closed, finally. 

“Sleep, Proko,” K said in his ear, so gentle that Proko knew for sure they were all alone now.  _ “Sleep.” _

Proko slept, and did not dream. 

***

Recovery was always hell. 

The pain was always the worst part, and Proko wished for something stronger than the regulated doses of painkillers that the quivering, kowtowing doctors had sent him home with. Wished for the days when they were all young enough to get fucked up with impunity. Now they were  _ adults,  _ with an empire to run and a reputation to uphold. They couldn’t be dopefiend cokeheads in Aglionby uniforms anymore. No matter how tempting the thought was. 

The pain was the worst part, but right next to it was the  _ boredom,  _ lying still in bed except for when he was lying still on the couch or shuffling between the two, the monotony broken up by sporadic piss breaks. 

The only upside was that K came home to him every night without fail, abandoning The (under-construction) Roost temporarily and showing his hand. It wasn’t the atmosphere he adored the most. It was that Proko was there. For now, he was content to sit on the couch with Proko’s feet in his lap, rubbing them absently while they binge-watched  _ Peaky Blinders _ on Netflix. 

K was always at his most tender when Proko was injured, though Proko could see the rage welled up in him, anger bubbling  _ just  _ beneath the surface of his skin. The kind of wrath that turned K into a vengeful god and made Proko so hot for it that he went crosseyed and gagging with the slightest touch. 

It didn’t matter how hot he was for it, though. K wouldn’t give it to him. Proko knew this well enough from his previous bouts of convalescence. No fucking until he was well enough to kick the asses of half a dozen goons and then go out for a night on the town afterward. 

He’d once thought it because K abhorred the weakness of him when he was injured, was repulsed by his shuffling gait and pinched expression and sweat-soaked brow. 

The years between them had made him wiser, though. 

He knew the truth now. Knew what K couldn’t articulate, in the past or present: that he’d rather strangle himself with his own Armani tie than lay a finger on Proko when he was already injured, afraid to do damage that couldn’t be repaired. 

He could wait. For K’s peace of mind, he could wait. 

*** 

It wasn’t unusual for K to stay out a little later, now that Proko was healed up enough that he could maneuver around the penthouse with no problems. He had business to attend to, business he’d been neglecting since Proko had been laid up. It wasn’t usual, and certainly not a cause for alarm when seven came and went with no K. By nine, Proko figured waiting until eating dinner was useless. By midnight he was in bed, dragging the pillows around to suit himself instead of sharing them with K, who stubbornly insisted on using all but two and also always forgot to buy more. 

He fell asleep fine; there was no romance in  _ sleep,  _ of all things. It wasn’t as if K was vital to him achieving it. He lived on his own, for the most part, when he wasn’t hurt like this or shacked up for a rare few days when things were slow for K. Proko was used to sleeping by himself. 

He woke to fingers in his hair, dragging down over his cheek, touching his lips with the sort of reverence some men of faith reserved for holy relics. The clock on the bedside table read  _ 3:33 AM.  _ Proko opened his mouth automatically, let K push those fingers inside, petting restlessly over his tongue. Trembling. 

It was the trembling that woke him fully, made him blink hard to see K in the blue glow from the clock, leaning over him in half of his expensive suit, his hair falling into his face from where he must’ve sweat out his pomade. He looked impossibly young in the dark— it only added to Proko’s disorientation. He propped himself up on his elbows, unease rising in his gut. 

“What’s happened?” He asked around the fingers in his mouth, the consonants glancing his teeth off of K’s knuckles, tasting like gunpowder residue and salt. “What’s wrong?” 

Still K didn’t speak, only leaned down to press a kiss to Proko’s open mouth, tongue scraping over the spot on the left side of its roof that always made Proko’s cock jerk. 

There was dried blood on his shirt, his sleeves. Proko knew the feeling of sanguine-stiffened cotton well enough to recognize it by touch, even in the dark. “Shh,” K said, and kissed his chin, his adam’s apple, the soft stretch of skin below his ear. “Shh, go back to sleep. It’s okay.” He sounded almost drunk, heavy and overcome. 

“I don’t want to sleep,” Proko murmured. K was holding himself up so their bodies did not touch, ever-mindful, as he’d been in the past weeks, of the exact location of Proko’s bandaged injury. He’d used featherlight touches to change those bandages in the first days Proko had been out of the hospital, shaking with his rage. 

“It’s late,” K hushed, tried to placate him— but there would be no placating. There would be no excuses. Nothing between them. K smelt like murder, tasted like murder. Felt like Death himself, hovering above Proko tangible and  _ real.  _ He was so hard. 

“K,” he said, and bared his throat. Opened his thighs, kicking the duvet down. There had been no one else who’d seen him like this in ten years.  _ Asking _ for it, instead of  _ demanding _ it. 

K was fixated on the spread of his legs, the eight-point stars tattooed on his knees, the vulnerable curve of his ankle bone, so deceptively delicate. “You’re still hurt,” he tried, one last vestige of valor against the animal clawing its way up his throat, desire incarnate. The air in the bedroom felt close and hot, important, like they’d never done this before. 

Proko reached out a greedy hand. K looked at it, slim-fingered and square-palmed, and thought of all the violence it had doled out on K’s orders. Thought of the first time they’d fucked, that same hand curled around his cock and jerking clumsily, unpracticed. There’d been no cross tattooed on his ring finger, then. It was as good as a line of text that read  _ I would do anything for you.  _

(He remembered That Night in vivid technicolor, remembered the way the body had felt when it had collided with the front end of his Evo, the way the blood spattered all over the windshield and how he’d known then that he’d really fucked up this time. Remembered Proko shoving him, insistent and  _ violent  _ with it, out of the driver’s seat. They could both hear the sirens.  _ Go, go, go!  _ Proko had snarled, and shoved him again, towards the safe darkness of a nearby alleyway, before getting into the driver’s seat himself.) 

_ “Fuck _ me,” Proko said, as intense as he ever was. “Joey,  _ fuck  _ me.” 

He opened up easily enough for it, despite the weeks that had passed since he’d taken K’s cock last. That was the best thing about fucking Proko. How  _ eager  _ he was for it, all the time. K moved as gently as he could make himself, when he was still shaking with adrenaline and the drug that was Proko’s visible devotion. 

Proko didn’t want gentle. He wanted to be  _ fucked,  _ and he wanted to be  _ loud,  _ groaning  _ Joey Joey Joey  _ even though  _ nobody  _ called K that anymore, hadn’t called him that since he was  _ fifteen years old,  _ fuck, except Proko, who’d breathe it down the line on their prison phone calls, treated like a fucking  _ king  _ at Rikers, surrounded by the whole of the incarcerated members of the Kavinsky crime family. Men old enough to be his grandfather and young enough to be his little brother, all of them serving time for the organization. They’d respected him. Nobody had laid a fucking finger on him. And he’d used up all his weekly phone calls to get K on the line, remind him of how none of the fucking Princeton coeds could live up to Proko’s memory. 

(The image of Proko in a prisoner’s uniform, serving time for something  _ K  _ had done, himself, had made him both sick and unbearably turned on. If he’d needed any confirmation that he was a twisted motherfucker, K would’ve gotten it after the first time he’d hung up from one of those phone calls with Proko and jerked himself raw over the thought.) 

K smeared a kiss over Proko’s knuckles and put his back into it, groaning. 

“Tell me tell me  _ tell me,”  _ Proko demanded, all but shouting. His free hand caught K’s hair in a tight grip, stinging. One of his knees was digging into K’s ribs through his dress shirt. He’d have a bruise there, tomorrow. 

“What,” K asked, blind from the white-hot pleasure that came with Proko  _ clenching  _ around him. His toes curled in his expensive Italian leather shoes. He should’ve gotten undressed, first.  _ “What,  _ Ilya?” 

“Tell me about what you  _ did,”  _ Proko hissed, more than half-gone himself and still so  _ difficult.  _ Still so fucking  _ needy.  _

“What,” K gasped, shoving in harder and  _ harder.  _ “You want to know how I fucking killed him? That ugly Sicilian motherfucker, how I fucking cut him and he cried like a  _ bitch,  _ Proko, is that what you want to fucking know?

From the beetle-bright glitter of Proko’s slitted eyes, that was  _ exactly  _ what he wanted to know. “Why?” He goaded, teeth bright like polished pearls. K had paid for those teeth. Had fucked him while he was still half-under the anesthesia, afterwards, his mouth swollen and his eyes glassy. He’d been so soft for it. 

“Because he  _ hurt you.”  _ K snarled. 

“Good,” Proko said, nodding faintly, and then came, spattering it over the red-brown stains already covering K’s once-crisp shirt. 

K’s hands spasmed around Proko’s kneecaps. His hips stuttered. He kept fucking Proko, who keened with it, boneless. 

“Keep going,” Proko commanded, unnecessary. “Joey, Joey, Joey.” 

K tucked his chin into his chest and came with a sob, raw-skinned and overwhelmed. He didn’t collapse on top of Proko but it was a close thing, rolling himself onto his ass on the floor next to the bed. One of his feet still sat on the edge, ankle overlapping Proko’s. His soft cock hung out of his trousers. 

“You killed him for  _ me.”  _ It was unbearably smug, the way Proko always got when he was fucked right. 

“I figure if they catch me I can tell them it was you.” K retorted, waspish and faux-annoyed. 

“Get into bed, motherfucker.” Proko laughed. Gone was the whining _Joey!-_ shrieking nymphomaniac from before. 

K grumbled, but got up and stripped off his clothes, leaving them in a pile next to the hamper. He’d have Skov burn them, later. 

He climbed into bed next to Proko, who bitched when he rearranged the pillows to his preferences and kicked him when he tried to take the silk-pillowcased memory foam pillow that was both of their favorite. 

_ 4:27 AM,  _ the clock read. K closed his eyes and went to sleep, lulled by Proko’s soft snoring. 

***

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


End file.
